My `Sledded Polacks'

My younger sons have lived in Houston long enough to pretend they remember snow. Both sledded in upstate New York when young, but we can document this only by admitting photographs as evidence. On Wednesday they sledded for the first time in four years, on grass, not snow, using cardboard, not American Flyers. We identified the steepest slope in a city park, and the boys experimented with sliding techniques. I warned them, in my stern fatherly fashion, to avoid trees, power poles and the histrionic tai chi practitioner at the bottom of the hill. I sat at the top, on the grass, reading -- not Ethan Frome, but a book recommended to me in an e-mail by Buce at Underbelly:

“I wonder if you have ever seen the commentaries by Michael Pennington. He's a London-based actor and director; he did a scene by scene director's commentary on Hamlet that struck me as the best single thing about H I ever read. My wife gave me two more --Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, and MSN starts off at the same high level of quality (I look forward perhaps especially to TN because it has never been one of my favorite plays; it will be interesting to see what he sees in it).

“Sadly, these three are the limit. I can only wish he had written 34 more.”

This suggestion come from the man who, when I touted Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare as “the best and most entertaining introductory guide to Shakespeare, after the plays and poems,” countered with Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare, which I subsequently read. Especially for the inexperienced reader, new to the plays, I bow to Buce’s judgment.

So, on the hill, in the plentiful sunshine, I started reading Pennington’s Hamlet: A User’s Guide (Nick Hern Books, London, 1996), a seductive hybrid of gossip, theatrical pragmatism and deep Shakespearean learning. It opens with an anecdote about the day Pennington, in the company of John Gielgud, on a movie location in Italy, learned of the death of Laurence Olivier:

“Now, when I think of the passing of Olivier…what I hear is the voice of John Gielgud later in the day, talking quietly about his own complex relationship with Olivier and his admiration for him that surpassed all rivalry. Generous, humorous, sad, modest, graceful and undeceived, it was the voice of Hamlet.”

The first production of Hamlet Pennington saw, at 13, was Olivier’s film. The first I saw, at 18, was a stage production with Dame Judith Anderson in the title role, in Toledo, Ohio. Pennington first played Hamlet in 1964, as a student at Cambridge University. Winningly, he says, “I still can’t read Shakespeare in silence,” and I have a tough time, too. Given his experience as actor, director and reader, Pennington makes excellent company. In his introduction, all that I have read thus far, he writes:

“I pause: What can a man say about his own Hamlet? The part is like a pane of clear glass disclosing the actor to ma greedy audience, and playing it changes you for good, and for the better.”

The best anatomy of the Hamlet-type I know is in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, in which the prince is never mentioned by name. In Hoffer’s vision, bored, rootless, underachieving intellectuals are ripe for trouble, whether in Cambridge or Cairo:

“It seems that frustration stems chiefly from inability to act, and that the most poignantly frustrated are those whose talents and temperament equip them ideally for a life of action but are condemned by circumstances to rust away in idleness.”

How many graduate students does that remind you of? I’m not certain if this is the direction in which Pennington’s book is headed, or whether he even renders a final accounting of Hamlet. I took a strong dislike to the prince from my first reading more than 40 years ago, and still find his bloody self-centeredness, his cruel use of others, offensive. Having just reread the play, however, its relevance to my kids, the great-grandchildren of Polish emigrants, sledding on cardboard, seems obvious. Remember Act I, Scene 1, when Horatio says:

“As thou art to thyself:
Such was the very armour he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated;
So frown'd he once, when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
'Tis strange.”